A New Approach Using Modeling to Interpret Measured Changes in Soil Organic Carbon in Forests: The Case of a 200 Year Pine Chronosequence on a Podzolic Soil in Scotland

Rita Razauskaite* (Corresponding Author), Elena Vanguelova, Thomas Cornulier, Pete Smith, Tim Randle, Jo U Smith

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
19 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Scotland is continuing to afforest land in order to combat climate change, but thelong-term capacity for carbon sequestration in forest soils is still uncertain. Here wepresent measurements that provide comparative estimates of soil organic carbonin grassland and forestry sites at steady state. We develop a new approach tointerpret these values based on simulation of organic carbon turnover in soils that areaccumulating carbon and use this to determine losses due to management operationsassociated with afforestation of grassland and deforestation/reforestation of foreststands. Soil organic carbon stock changes were studied in a >120 year-old Scotspine chronosequence and adjacent grassland sites on podzolic soils. Significant carbonaccumulation was measured in the top organic soil horizons with forest age, whileno changes were noted in the deeper mineral soil horizons. The simulations with theRothC-26.3 model revealed that pine forests on sandy soils could lose a significantamount of soil organic carbon through management operations. The lowest modeledstocks of soil organic carbon were not in the young sites (0–25 years old), but at 43years since reforestation. Using measured data from our study site, the simulationsof grassland afforestation suggested that accumulation of organic carbon under forestoccurs mainly in the organic horizons, while the deeper sandy mineral soil horizons arelikely to become depleted in organic carbon compared to grasslands. Our simulationssuggest that afforestation of grasslands would increase overall soil carbon stocks butmay deplete the more stable carbon pools in the deeper mineral horizons of the podzols
Original languageEnglish
Article number527549
Number of pages18
JournalFrontiers in Environmental Science
Volume8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Nov 2020

Bibliographical note

Discounted APC via the Frontiers Open Access Agreement
Acknowledgments:
Andy Kennedy for teaching about the podzolic soil sampling and horizon recognition. Rothiemurhus estate owners and the forest manager–Piers Voisey. Forest Research agency Soil Sustainability Research and Forest Mensuration, Modeling and Forecasting Science groups for consultations, practical and financial support. Ron Summers and Samantha Broadmeadow for help with GIS maps. Dr Robert Wilson for the help with finding ancient pine woodland locations in Scotland. We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu). This work contributes to the UKRI-funded Soils-R-GRREAT project (NE/P019455/1). We thank to two reviewers for their insightful comments.
Funding:
The research was funded by the University of Aberdeen and Forest Research joint PhD training grant. James Hutton Institute provided help in kind. The NERC (Natural Environmental Resources Council) grant NE/P019455/1 was used to pay publishing fees.

Keywords

  • soil organic carbon (SOC)
  • forest, pine
  • afforestation
  • RothC model
  • Scotland
  • sandy acidic soils
  • forest
  • pine

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A New Approach Using Modeling to Interpret Measured Changes in Soil Organic Carbon in Forests: The Case of a 200 Year Pine Chronosequence on a Podzolic Soil in Scotland'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this